Under-23s football is more about developing footballers than winning. But there’s a caveat.

With a prestigious International Cup final place against Porto up for grabs at Carrow Road on Friday night, there is no way Sunderland coach Elliott Dickman will be sending his players out just to enjoy the game.

The Black Cats have a pretty good record in junior football, finishing second in the Premier Reserve League when it was an under-21 competition last year, and only a point off it the season before. The first team’s record in that time shows wins are only part of the equation, and under the pressure of relegation battles they have been unwilling or unable to translate that talent to a higher level.

Players need to develop a winning technique and a winning mentality, and Dickman will demand both from his young charges against Norwich City.

“The pressure of the game is a big thing for our lads to learn,” says Dickman, who has been on the development coaching staff since 1998 but only took up the under-23s job in January. “I’m not saying the league games are not must-win games, of course they are – every game is – but we try to play with a certain style in the development programme. As long as we can see some positives from whatever happens, that will be the important thing.

“It’s the semi-final of a cup so we have to do what we can to try to progress. But it’s still within the principles of what we want.

“There will be a little bit of sticking to what we’re good at but at the same time we want to progress. We might have to manage the game a little bit differently to a normal league game. The pace of the game might be a bit slower or faster and we have to control that. Whether we can or not, we will find out.”

There has not been much of an international feel to the semi-finals of the International Cup. A Premier League initiative, half the clubs come from the English leagues, the other 12 from the Continent.

Villarreal are the holders and Porto still might succeed them, but they were the only interlopers in a last-four line-up completed by Swansea City.

“It would have been great to be playing a foreign side in the last four but you’ll take anybody at this stage,” says Dickman, whose side have beaten Benfica, PSV Eindhoven and Atletico Madrid. “We’re expecting a tough, hard game at Carrow Road. They publicise the games quite well down there so they get good crowds for their Under-23s’ normal league games. If there’s a good little atmosphere it will be a good experience for the players.

“We know a lot about Norwich and I’m sure they know a lot about us as well.

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“Norwich have got some good players and quite a few senior players. If they play them against some of our young players it’s going to be tough but a good experience for them to pit their wits against first-team footballers.”

Asked what his side learn against foreign opposition in such a multi-cultural era, Dickman replies: “It puts them up against different opposition and different tactics within games. It’s not always about formations and systems, it could be about delaying the game, slowing the game down, persisting fouling which they do on the Continent a little bit more. It’s about being able to deal with that. To us in the British game it can be quite frustrating watching because they’re a little more ruthless when they haven’t got the ball, there’s more shirt-pulling and the lads get frustrated with that.”

The game comes at the end of an international break, so inevitably there has been a lot of hand-wringing about what English academies are and are not doing.

Jermain Defoe totally deserved and completely justified his England call-up, but in truth there were few alternatives for Gareth Southgate.

So is three British teams in the semi-finals a sign that things are going right or a misleading diversion?

“I think it says something,” comments Dickman. “There’s a lot of good things going on in a lot of academies across the country. The hard thing is getting the individual that is good enough into the first team because the standard of the Premier League is so high.”

John Egan and Conor Hourihane are cases in point. Both left Sunderland to get their chance, and made international debuts for the Republic of Ireland on Tuesday.

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“You ask anyone who worked with those players, they’ll tell you that they were good players with good potential, but again it comes down to the manager’s decision,” says Dickman. “The manager didn’t feel those players were suitable for his first team. It is a tough decision to make, it really is, anything like that you have to respect whoever has made that call.

“The beauty about it is those two individuals, and the other ones out there, they haven’t just felt sorry for themselves and wilted away into nothing, they’ve thought you know what I want a living in the game, and yeah they’ve had to drop down a couple of levels.”

It is another reminder that what is between the ears is as important as what is in the boots – and that Friday’s result needs to be seen in a wider context.